Successes - Peterson Law Group
Technology-Savvy Law Firm Uses Fortis to Go Paperless

Would you like to use Twitter to contact your lawyer? Some clients of Peterson Law Group in Bryan, Texas would much rather tweet than make a phone call. "If they can break down their issues to 140 characters or less – that's how we communicate with them," said Chris Peterson, a principal with the firm. Using electronic document management to administrate the flow of information is another way the firm employs technology to better serve clients.

Peterson Law Group, with offices in Bryan and Conroe, Texas, handles business, family, and real estate law, plus estate planning. "When the firm was established in 2008, we knew we wanted to convert our attorneys' existing records and go to a paperless office system, but we weren't sure of the best way to do it," said Peterson.

Peterson worked with Agnitek, a Westbrook reseller based in College Station, Texas. "The consultants at Agnitek suggested Fortis because they thought it was good fit for us. The price point was a lot better than some of the other software we were looking at and Fortis has the functionality we need," Peterson said.

Expedite filing and retrieval
Agnitek set up and installed Fortis and developed document types and queries based on input from Peterson Law Group. "Our goal was to speed up retrieval with full text indexing and OCR capabilities, and provide a safety net to prevent misfiling documents," Peterson explained.

Everyone in the firm uses Fortis, to store and retrieve documents. "Fortis has definitely made our work lives easier from the standpoint of not having to look for documents all the time," he said. "We can find things simply and easily, and it's all available on our desktops through the network."

Email is the most common form of communication that is archived into Fortis using a "send to Fortis" button from the Microsoft® Outlook® interface. When a user highlights an email or a group of emails, a dialog box pops up. Once the pertinent case number is entered, the email is indexed and archived automatically. "Then you can delete the email from your in box. Plus you can view all the email that's gone back and forth about a particular case in one place," Peterson said. "If I'm out of town, an associate can still access emails between me and the client or the opposing counsel. It makes it easier to pick up where someone else has left off."

In a traditional law office without document management, every email a lawyer sends is printed out and placed in a central filing basket. Then a clerk files it in the appropriate place. "With Fortis, there are no interim steps. There's no chance of losing or misfiling an email and the efficiency is so much greater," Peterson said.

Fortis also automates Bates numbering, an identification system used in the legal field. "Now when we do discovery production, Fortis auto numbers our documents. Then we copy the files to a CD to deliver them to the opposing counsel," Petersons said.

Improve business continuity
For disaster recovery, Peterson Law Group uses Fortis in combination with on- and off-site network backup. "The attorneys in the Gulf Coast all learned from hurricanes Katrina and Ike about what happens if your office is closed by a natural disaster. We don't have paper documents, so there's nothing to blow away or get ruined. It's all electronic," Peterson said. "If something were to happen, we would be up and running in a matter of a few hours without losing anything."

Peterson Law Group has archived more than 500,000 documents in Fortis. "When we moved to new offices two years ago, we brought three U-Haul trucks of banker's boxes containing our old files. Now we're a few banker's boxes away from having about 10 years of files archived in Fortis," Peterson said. "Many attorneys store old files off-site, but they like to have records from the past 15 years or so in-house. I think about how much less we're paying in rent than some of our competitors because we don't have any leasable space designated for file boxes and they do."

The firm also archives documents for accounts payable, human resources and tax information. "Our use of technology is a differentiating factor. We use a Web-based law practice management system and we have a secure extranet where we post documents so that clients can access them whenever they want to," Peterson said. "We have a blog, a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page. We'll communicate with our clients in the way they feel most comfortable."

Using Fortis provides increased efficiency that also helps Peterson Law Group set itself apart. "When you've practiced law the old way, and then you start practicing law using technology and automation – you notice a huge difference," Peterson said.

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